About My Father’s Business - Lillian Beckwith

“Why do we have to ask Jesus to pity mice in Plicity and yet if we get mice in our larder we have to set traps and kill them?” Lillian Beckwith’s innocent question seems to sum up the often delightful confusions of childhood but, sadly, it was no appreciated by her strict Aunty Rye.

In this charming new volume of autobiography Miss Beckwith takes us back to the years between the wars when her father ran a grocer’s shop in Cheshire, long before she had ever heard of the Hebrides, let alone Bruach.

However, even at that age, her eye for character was already sharp and observant and this book is full of engaging personalities every bit as appealing in their way as her Hebridean neighbours were to be later. Mr. Josh, the carpenter, with his three jokes repeated on every visit and the unknown fourth which passed young ‘Irish’ and the countless other customers who filled the shop are all drawn with characteristic sympathy and humour. Above all this is a book full of the scents of childhood: soft soap and aniseed balls, bacon and tea, a book which will recall to many, with nostalgia, a picture of a world now swamped by the impersonal army of supermarkets.

The thousands who have read The Hills is Lonely and its successors will delight in this new view of the gallant heroine of Bruach and will also appreciate the superb decorations by Douglass Hall, who has captured the spirit of About My Father’s Business as exactly as he did that of the Hebrides. For everyone Lillian Beckwith’s book will provide a clear-eyed view of an enchanted time so many of us have lost in the clouds of memory.